Fat People: The Latest Victims of Oppression

by Patricia L. Dickson1/13/16
As if we didn’t have enough groups of people claiming victim status, we can now add fat people to the list. College campuses across the country are including a new academic field in fat studies that focuses on combating weightism, fat stigma, and the weight-based oppression of fat people.

Rather than focus on the health issues stemming from obesity, fat studies courses advocate against the position that obesity is unhealthy or undesirable and instead call for understanding and acceptance. Fatness is framed as a social justice issue.

According to Campus Reform, the University of Maryland College Park’s fat studies course labels dieting as an enemy of diversity that needs to be defeated. Fat liberation movements and activism are encouraged as ways to combat fatphobia, weightism, and the stigma attached to obesity. Required reading material includes a Fat Liberation Manifesto. No one should be surprised that these courses are typically found in the women’s and gender studies departments.

According to Oregon State University’s website, the course “examines body weight, shape, and size as an area of human difference subject to privilege and discrimination that intersects with other systems of oppression based on gender, race, class, age, sexual orientation, and ability.” University of New Hampshire students formed a university organization titled “People Opposing Weightism (POW!).” The goal of the organization is to spread education, acceptance, and awareness of people of size. With that goal in mind, the student group created a tumblr page that features obese women. One page goes so far as to feature a naked obese woman standing in the middle of an intersection in New York City.

Exactly what is to be gained from these courses? These institutions of higher learning are becoming nothing more than insane asylums. It appears that the only goal of colleges and universities today is to turn every student into an oppressed victim.

11 Responses to Fat People: The Latest Victims of Oppression

My understanding is that obesity is also covered under the federal protections for the handicapped. As a supposed beneficiary, I’m very skeptical of the value of any such efforts, since they encourage prospective employers not to hire the handicapped rather than face potential lawsuits later if they fire them or don’t treat them as well as the workers think they should be.

Progressive Utopia means being a slob, a pervert, a thief, or whatever, and normalizing it. Good golly, we mustn’t hold people to sane and healthy standards because that would be “repressive.”

One of the ironies of this is that it is likely that more women, in particular, are fat because of feminism. It’s stressful having to act like a man and/or being a woman in fishbowl of girly men.

Women have alienated men at the same time they are looking for a more complete and total kind of emotional satisfaction than anyone has the right to expect. And with women now giving the milk away for free (subverting the need for men to buy a cow), it’s particularly tough on middle-aged women looking for a mate. Guys their age (or older) don’t have to “settle.” There is always some younger woman out there ready and willing for “hook-up” sex.

I’m not saying there aren’t obese men. And I have no idea if one sex or another is monopolizing the blubber. But don’t doubt me that this “sensitivity” baloney regarding fat people is by women and for women.

I think common decency means that you treat people with a certain amount of interpersonal respect. My view is that fat people ought not to be ridiculed to their face. But as a principle, if you are fat, you need to do something about it for your own sake.

Of course, it’s particularly bizarre this New Progressivism if it continues to branch off. The expected result of continuing Progressivism (socialism) is that one’s fatness is no longer a private matter because (due to socialized medicine) other people have to bare the costs.

But now you have these “sensitivity” loons trying to creating another victim group. So which wing of the lunatic Progressive party will win? Will it be those who think being obsess is not just everyone’s business but the government’s business, or will the winner be those who try to de-stigmatize being as bloated as a whale?

Frankly, if you’re morbidly obese, I wouldn’t want to hire you unless you had an airtight medical reason for that condition. And I think it should be every employer’s right to make that call.

Human dignity is a squishy term, and one often used by the left to try to insulate it’s perversions from criticism.

But I do believe there is a concept of “human dignity” that is good, healthy, real, and necessary. And if you are grossly overweight, you have leapt straight off the human dignity platform and into the quagmire of Bad Stuff.

I had multiple reasons for losing weight which I talk about in various threads regarding the Slobocracy. Health, mobility, money, and just plain human dignity were all concerns. I don’t hate fat people (I don’t hate Winston Churchill or Benjamin Franklin) but surely being obese is one of the Deadly Sins. It’s telling the world “I don’t give a flying fart about myself.”

And I don’t like to project that image or live with that dumbed-down state of affairs. I will not go quietly into that Slobocracy. Lord knows we have enough crap to deal with in this life. But reverting to childhood and fixating on food as a psychological pacifier is not the way to go. We need to man-up.

the University of Maryland College Park’s fat studies course labels dieting as an enemy of diversity that needs to be defeated

The word “diversity” is the key. This is just another leftist project to Balkanize the culture. By attacking norms and breaking down everyone in to smaller grievance groups the left weakens any opposition which may stand against it. This is why the left attacks the Church, whites, etc. In the end, they aim to make sure there is no group strong enough to stand against them.

One of the points I was making is that fat people being covered under the umbrella of “sensitivity” and “diversity” makes an interesting challenge for an overall movement that wants to micro-manage our behavior. Shall we call these “diversity” Progressives potential conservative allies because they don’t want the state discriminating against them because they are fat? Socialized medicine is rickety enough as it is without having to normalize one of the most unhealthy and expensive behaviors short of drug use: obesity.

Or will the state just print and borrow more money for the normalization of further unhealthy behavior until The Collapse puts our entire society on a financial diet?

I still think this is a woman-driven issue. Men are the ones who have traditionally written and enforced objective laws. Women tend to be very squishy in this regard. This “diversity” and “sensitivity” shtick is ultimately just politics being inserted into pop psychology. It’s the “I’m okay, you’re okay” mentality, no matter what. No matter that you are fat. No matter that you might be a rug muncher. No matter that you practice witchcraft. No matter that you sleep around like a hound. Etc.

That’s not to let guys off the hook. But the reality is that all this “sensitivity” crap has let them off the hook. Men can now remain forever boys and never have to learn how to become a gentleman. And women keep obsessing over stupid stuff such as normalizing obesity. Women should instead spend more time trying to look nice and men should spend more time trying to act mature.

One of the points I was making is that fat people being covered under the umbrella of “sensitivity” and “diversity” makes an interesting challenge for an overall movement that wants to micro-manage our behavior

I don’t think the left is overly concerned with consistency. Their object is power and they will gloss over any contradictions which will, inevitably, arise from their half-baked ideas and continuing grasp for power. The most most crass example of this was on display when the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop treaty in 1939.

I would say there’s a multiplicity of interests. Heck, even conservatives don’t see eye-to-eye on many subjects or put the same emphasis on various subjects.

No doubt many people on the Left use their ideology simply as a means to power. But I think they are also true believers to some extent. This justifies, at least in their own minds, their naked accumulation of power. Thus has it probably ever been.

Yes, the Left is full of half-baked ideas. They are a new brand of crazy. They want “diversity” but only for some. They want “equality” but only for the select few. Others may be impugned and restricted at will.

It is my opinion, Mr. Kung, that wisdom is a life-long process and that our culture is about as anti-wisdom as you can get. In effect, it instills shallowness and stupidity. It instills narrow thinking and superficial bumper-sticker reasoning.

I don’t believe mankind has ever been free of blinding zealousness, corrosive factionalism, or a destructive and strident self-interest beyond all reason. But the Left has certainly combined many of these features into a political ideology. And with this ideology they reap destruction wherever they go.

If I had to parse all that is and that has changed with a simple metric it would be Marx/Freud/Darwin vs. Christ/Free Enterprise/Reasonableness.

This may be related to blind/deaf people who are hostile to any effort to cure the condition in some people. They want their particular handicaps to maximize their political power. This is one of the consequences of totalitarianism: everything is politicized.

They want their particular handicaps to maximize their political power.

Sort of like a child maximizes its power by putting on a temper tantrum. Although these “Progressives” have learned very well how to whitewash their juvenile behavior with nice-sounding words such as “equality,” “tolerance,” and “compassions,” it is still about the child evoking a temper tantrum to try to effect his or her world via that means.

The sad thing is, there are damn few adults left who will stand up to this childishness and call it what it is. Hey, if you don’t like being called “fatty” then go easy on the donuts and maybe do a little exercise.

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